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Saturday, January 19, 2008

Revision3 Publishes Layout Change

After much inside-joke giggling from fellow podcastersNTT and Jerrick, I decided to be a thermometer and subscribe to Revision3 show(s). The only two I'm interested in are Diggnation, of course, and the Totally Rad Show. I had finished Diggnation and moved on to TRS when I wanted to check something else out at a slower point of the episode, when the site indicated that it was down for upgrade. It's amazing how quickly I forgot it, until I wanted to link my friend to Diggnation and so opened another window.

After that I was careful going about the TRS episode page, because I knew that if a careless click brought me out of that page, I was never going to see it again. Waiting until TRS was going into the ending chores (sponsors and email), I screenshot the old page before refreshing to its new page. Here's the difference.

Previous TRS Ep 43 page

New TRS Ep 43

cont'd

First thing one would notice would be the comparatively large-ass player. I estimated the new player to be about 2.5 times larger than the old one. There's a big change there. 555x337, according to the official news post about it. Instead of the standard black-green layout that colored all R3 shows previously, each show has a distinct look of its own to differentiate itself. Good call to make put viewers into better show-related surroundings, rather than feeling like you're looking at different sides of an otherwise similarly red-colored die. Sharing and downloading options more accessible and more obvious. The expansion of the blog body also stretched the page out more, which explains why I had to take two screenshots to do the new layout justice where the old one could comfortably be captured in one.

The news post touts easier navigation from a neater layout, but it is indeed arguable as put forward by NTT that it looks quite cluttered. Perhaps enough comments would make them change it accordingly.

Personally though, who cares. In both layouts you could say that the page elements were centred around the player, but that statement's brought to a whole new dimension in the new design. And I have to say, R3's videos are clear and easy to read even with the small screen, but the new big screen is a welcome relief to our monitor-strained eyes.